GA-880GMA-UD2H Boots fine, Reboots Bad

[DawnTreader]

Hello All

I will never buy another Gigabyte Motherboard again.

I bought this board as a budget machine base. I have supported RAM, a good case, power supply, CPU, hard drive and DVD Writer. All the other components work as expected. Even the motherboard does, if you never have to reboot the computer.

If you do then it will not post and you will have to turn off the power supply and then turn it back on and then hit the power button. Otherwise, you will get three long beeps and one short until it drives you nuts.

I was hoping that trying a different brand than the one i am used to would allow me to expand my horizons, not send me in to a troubleshooting frenzy. I went to the store where I bought the motherboard; they say they have had a lot of trouble with Gigabyte motherboards. I explained the problem; they said I should try replacing the motherboard because maybe a capacitor was faulty. So here I am with a second motherboard same results.

It is another component you say... well all the components are brand new, and I can actually get into windows. I managed to install it and everything works fine. I even ran a bench test on it. Everything works.

Now because on both boards this happened right after I made a few changes in the BIOS I updated the BIOS to see if it would set it back to the original specs. This didn’t help either.

I have tried to use only one RAM stick; I have moved the RAM into different slots. I do not have a video card in the machine as there is onboard video. I have the SATA set to AHCI.

I am tired of this, I spent all last weekend dealing with this trying to get it to reboot normally and now I am doing it again. Anyone have a solution to this problem? Anyone got any ideas?

[bofh1971]

One thing to consider, I had an issue on several pc's at work a few years back, turned out there was a bug in the chipset that caused certain graphics cards to fail to initialise when the pc was first switched on. (Not gigabyte btw)

Nforce chipset and Geforce cards the remedy was to press reset , or in extreme cases power off and on again,
this problem was intermittent but of course for the users rather annoying.

This turned out to be some problem on the AGP bus on the old nforce chipset

I am wondering if there is some kind of bug on your chipset that maybe a bios update will help.

of course we don't have your specs, so cannot comment on what may be wrong.

on another note, some chipsets regardless of motherboard manufacturer can be very fussy with ram.

So some nice Kingston HyperX 1600mhz ram that worked flawlessly on a 790X board causes random BSOD on a 790FX board
not to mention the budget 770 board from MSI that refused to work with any budget Ram, meaning that the saving made on the board was lost when expensive ram had to be fitted!

So try chaning the Ram or VGA Card if you can

Good Luck

[DawnTreader]

Now because on both boards this happened right after I made a few changes in the BIOS I updated the BIOS to see if it would set it back to the original specs. This didn’t help either.

i dont have a video card in the machine, it is on the motherboard. built in. i dont think they would have released this motherboard before making sure that the on board video worked properly.

i downloaded the RAM list from the gigabyte website. i bought the exact RAM that they said was quality tested to work with the motherboard. i have learned from experience that RAM can be a problem if it has not be tested with a motherboard and so i made very sure that i bought RAM that was listed. this RAM is on the list.

the only anomaly that i can think of is that i made changes in the BIOS to make the drives run AHCI and for the RAM to be at 1066 speed because the processor i bought for this build doesnt handle the 1333.

could it be that the hard drive has to be SATA3? this motherboard is made to run SATA3 but i am using a SATA2 drive. is there even such a thing as a SATA3 drive yet?

[bofh1971]

There are SATA3 drives they have to list them as SATA 6Gbps to avoid confusion.

Just because the ram is certified doesnt mean its not faulty.  Motherboards can be very sensitive to voltage variance, and with the underclocking that is being done on the ram, this could cause stability issues.

The power supply could also be a problem , it only takes one of the 12v rails to be iffy to make a system fall over.

I would check the system if possible with another PSU and alternative ram.

Good luck.